Unofficial news and tips about Google

November 1, 2011

Read Your Shared Items in Google Reader

The latest Google Reader update removed all the social features, including the section that allowed you to read the items you've shared. Fortunately, the shared items page is still available at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/username (replace username with your Gmail username) and you can subscribe to this page in Google Reader, but only if the page was public. Click "subscribe" and paste the URL of the shared items page. If you don't have a Gmail account, load the shared items feed in Reader, right-click "Your shared items" and copy the URL.

You can now use Google Reader's search box to find a post you've shared. Click the "All items" drop-down next to the search box, scroll down to the end of the list (or just press "End") and you'll find the shared items feed.

To unsubscribe from this feed, you need to go to the settings page, click "Subscriptions", type "shared items" in the search box and click the "unsubscribe button".

Are google going out their way to wreck and otherwise ruin everything they have built? This new interface is horrific, removed all your previous shares. Not to mention the fact they are wasting so much screenspace its untrue.

Just to say, I dont think its just reader, the whole new Google UI is a complete wasteful mess.

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/username didn't work for my username, but I clicked the other link, and that worked fine. Turns out that it wasn't a username, but a seemingly random number (which doesn't match my profile ID on Google+, either).

Oh farking fabulous. I use stars to mark news items that I want to come back to read later. I was using "shared" as a way to mark another category, serialized stories. Now they're all lost. THANKS GOOGLE.

And when in hell are they going to let us FILTER topics we never ever want to read about like "iPad" "iPhone" "Gaga" "Britney" and "Steve Jobs"?

As long time user of Reader, I'm now looking to migrate away from this iteration of Google Reader. The reasons are clear. Many of them have been mentioned before - the destruction of the sharing aspects of Reader (I got lots of information from other peoples shares), the wasteful use of space in the design makes it unusable on a laptop as the white space at the top reduces the available information space to next to nothing. At least GMail has a "compact" view option.

Sorry Google, I'm going back to NetVibes for now. If you redo this dogs dinner of a redesign into something I can actually use, I will come back. Until then

2. I want to share items with freinds within Google Reader, not through Google+. It's incredibly convenient to see my friends' shared items as just another Reader subscription.

3. Ok, so now we can create a "public Page". You've still made it MORE difficult to share by requiring us to copy and paste the link elsewhere, instead of just clicking "Share".

Dislike. I've been trying to find an alternative to Google Reader because of these things and have yet to find one that does all of the things listed above. Every day that this goes on, you lose more users.

Just to note: If you've been using shared folders, you can still convert them to "bundles" and share those instead. The RSS feed changes, but this is a good opportunity to switch your feeds to a FeedBurner or Yahoo Pipes feed, since if you change the source, that feed won't change. At any rate, the same functionality can be achieved through this "bundle" method.

To explain further on this bundle thing: If you tagged things before and they fed into other locations (e.g., Facebook), then you can still use tags as a part of a bundle (that is, a bundle with only one thing: a tag). I use this to send items to Facebook and to my wife. The old "share" feature could be replicated with this idea, too, although it's more clunky. You could have a tag, say "s" and then the keyboard shortcuts would just be "t" then "s". Not quite as good as just "s".

Chris S - thanks for the tip about Bundles. It took me a while to find it as they have moved the functionality from "Settings" into the GReader reading pane :-)

It looks as if I might be able to use GReader in much the way I used to but it is worrying that these features seem to be on a downward slide and hidden away, as they are no longer how we are "supposed to" use GReader.

I find it remarkably arrogant that Google's attitude is, "if you don't like it, Eff-Off, or stick with us and post feedback on the user forums". They might as well add, "where we will ignore you anyway".

A another simple way to use your feed on an another website or widget is to go to settings then the next tab "send to" and simply add twitter share option (just check the box) then parse the twitter account feed via Twitter API.

Insane - I want my shared back. Theres an item I shared that I want to look at again. Now I can't find it because the list is gone, and the "trick" specified does not work. What are google playing at ?

Let's be honest, the new Google reader is a major step backwards, they basically took out all the productivity aspects of it and made into a function less subscription tool, no good & would be very surprised if they don't see the usage decline dramatically..